Part 23

Consequently, during this feverish period, neither public praise nor public blame affected me very much, although the type of criticism that came from friends was different. Just because they were friends and I wanted them to understand, I was unhappy if they did not. But, since persons one likes can have great influence and friendships take time, I refrained from making many new ones. Nevertheless, those I had then are as good today; when we meet we pick up the threads where we dropped them.

The War halted the progress of the birth control movement temporarily. The groups that had before been active now found new interests. The radicals were convulsed and their own ranks torn in two by the opposition to conscription. Influenza swept over the world and in its passage took off many of our old companions. Governor Whitman’s promised commission blew up. One bright bugle sounded when I learned that the section on venereal disease in _What Every Girl Should Know_, which had once been banned in the New York _Call_ and for which Fania had been fined, was now, officially but without credit, reprinted and distributed among the soldiers going into cantonments and abroad. At home all felt there was little to do but wait until people came back to their senses; the _Review_ was the only forward step I could take at the time.

Late in 1917 a new recruit was enlisted. Nobody ever knew Kitty Marion’s true name. She had been born in Westphalia, Germany, and when she was fifteen her father had whipped her once too often and she had run away to England, where eventually she had headed a turn at a music hall.

The London slums had aroused Kitty’s social conscience, and she had abandoned her own career to enroll with Mrs. Pankhurst in the suffrage crusade, becoming one of the most determined of her followers. When put in jail she set fire to her cell, chewed a hole in her mattress, broke the window, and upon being released threw bricks at Newcastle Post Office. Seven times she went to prison, enduring four hunger strikes and two hundred and thirty-two compulsory feedings, biting the hand that forcibly fed her. Since it was distasteful to the Government to have any suffragette die in prison, Kitty, under the so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act, was once released to a nursing home until she should have strength enough to return to confinement. Friends visited her there, exchanged clothes with her, and she escaped. On another occasion the Bishop of London personally begged her to give up her struggle. At the outbreak of war, the Pankhurst forces hustled her over to America rather than have her run the almost certain risk of deportation or internment.

Selling _The Suffragette_ on the streets of London had been part of the initiation which duchesses and countesses and other noble auxiliaries to the Pankhurst cause had had to undergo. Kitty had stood side by side with them. Since we had so experienced a veteran ready for service we began to offer the _Review_ on the sidewalks of New York. Our more sober supporters objected because they considered it undignified. But men and women from here, there, and everywhere passed through the commercial centers of New York, and this was a real means of reaching them.

All of us took a hand, but Kitty was the only one who stood the test of years. Strong, stoutish, tow-headed, her blue eyes bright and keen in spite of being well on in her fifties, she became a familiar sight. Morning, afternoon, and until midnight—workdays, Sundays, and holidays—through storms of winter and summer, she tried every street corner from Macy’s to the Grand Central Terminal. But her favorite stand was Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, right at Times Square. In her own words she was enjoying “the most fascinating, the most comic, the most tragic, living, breathing movie in the world.”

Many people still think I must be Kitty Marion. Everywhere they say to me, “I saw you twenty years ago outside the Metropolitan Opera House. You’ve changed so I wouldn’t know you.”

Street selling was torture for me, but I sometimes did it for self-discipline and because only in this way could I have complete knowledge of what I was asking others to do. In addition, I learned to realize what possible irritations Kitty had to encounter. Notwithstanding the insults of the ignorant, the censure of the bigots, she remained good-humored. They said to her, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought to be arrested, to be shot, to be in jail, to be hanged!” or, “It’s disgraceful, disgusting, scandalous, villainous, criminal, and unladylike!” When someone asked, “Have you never heard God’s word to ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth’?” Kitty replied, “They’ve done that already,” and, knowing her Apocrypha as well as her Bible, retorted in kind, “Does it not say in Ecclesiasticus: 16; 1, ‘Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children’?”

During the War it was astonishing how many men, in and out of uniform, mistook Birth Control for British Control. “We don’t want no British Control here!” they exclaimed. Kitty would correct them, “Birth Control,” and someone would call, “Oh, that’s worse!”

Who bought the _Review_? This question was invariably asked, and the answer was—radicals, the curious, girls about to be married, mothers, fathers, social workers, ministers, physicians, reformers, revolutionaries, foreigners. A psychological analysis of reactions of passers-by when they saw the words “birth control” would have been interesting. I never could credit the power those simple words had of upsetting so many people. Their own complexes as to what sex meant to them appeared to govern them. Many were disappointed at its staidness; some were highly indignant, others highly amused, regarding it as a joke; some bought with the set faces of soldiers going over the top; some looked and looked and then strolled on. Others walked by only to return with the money ready, hastily stuff the magazine in their pockets, and move away, trying to seem unconcerned. The majority bought with the utmost seriousness in the hope that it might solve their personal problems.

“Jail” was the instant reaction of every new policeman on the beat. Kitty, who knew she needed no license, would contest the point with him while a crowd gathered. But few of her arresters were familiar with the law in the name of which they hauled her off to the station. Time and again my night’s slumbers were broken to go and bail her out. J.J. was always able to have the case dismissed, but only after it had been argued and proved in our favor.

Once Charles Bamberger, the _agent provocateur_ of the Society for the Suppression of Vice who had brought about Bill Sanger’s arrest, worked much the same ruse on Kitty. His society was supposedly designed to promote purity, which was to its members synonymous with good. But in order to do this they induced people to break the law by appealing to their deepest human sympathies, a form of trickery not to be condoned by any moral code.

Bamberger, on repeated visits to Kitty at our office, poignantly described the condition of his unfortunate wife whose health depended absolutely on her getting contraceptive information. Anna’s sense, like Fania Mindell’s, was unfailing in recognizing such decoys; I never went against it. But in vain did she warn Kitty, who gave him the information. He had her arrested, and she was not allowed to tell in court the means by which he had obtained his evidence; she had to serve a term. Kitty’s sentence did not have adequate publicity, but so violent was the war temper, that, in view of her German birth, even well-disposed newspapers practically ignored it.

In addition to selling the _Review_ we tried another experiment in street propaganda. During the warm evenings of one summer Kitty, Helen Todd, and I, often accompanied by George Swazey, a friendly Englishman, proceeded to the neighborhood of St. Nicholas Avenue above 125th Street, where many white collar families lived. We used to buy a soapbox at the nearest delicatessen and Helen, who had a lank, swarthy picturesqueness which attracted attention, mounted it; Swazey, standing behind, held aloft an American flag. Though not a soul might be in sight except our little group with its bundles of literature and Kitty with her _Reviews_, Helen began in her beautiful voice, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” bowing to the trees, “we welcome you here tonight.” When nobody appeared she began again. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” and this time one or two strollers usually lingered. Immediately we raised our pasteboard banners with “birth control” printed in black letters. She was off in full swing, and in a few minutes we had our audience.

In the course of our various trials people had sent checks and made donations to the special Defense Fund account, and we sent anybody who gave money, no matter how much or how little, a mimeographed report of all contributors. We had also accepted almost two thousand paid-in-advance subscriptions, and had therefore incurred an obligation to continue the _Review_ for twelve months.

One May morning when I put my key in the office door and swung it open, Anna Lifshiz and I stood and gazed at each other. Only the telephone perched forlornly on top of a packing box relieved the bare and empty room—files, furniture, vouchers, checks, and business records were gone. We still had to supply the subscribers with nine issues more, yet we had no equipment and not one cent in the bank account of the _Review_.

It was a challenge. We hurried over to Third Avenue and for twenty dollars refurnished the office. The loss of the contributors’ cards, however, was irreparable. I could never, in spite of my best efforts, recover either them or the missing funds.

The strain to finance the _Review_ was so great that after June no more issues came out until December—the printer trusted us as far as he was able from month to month. Often the bank account was down to the last hundred dollars, just enough to hold it open. Yet it might be necessary to mail letters; the call might be urgent. I was hesitant to spend that last amount, but I believed faith could bring anything to realization. Invariably when I operated on that principle and did what I was impelled to do, money poured in perhaps ten times over. Always we cleaned the slate at the end of the year.

This was one of the periods of getting roots in and waiting for the organism to grow, of quiescence before the new beginning and quickening. I kept going, conscious that with every act I was progressing in accord with a universal law of evolution—moral evolution but evolution just the same.

This belief seemed at times to force locked doors. It enabled me to dictate hundreds of letters, to interview dozens of people, to debate, or to lecture, all in twenty-four hours. Day after day I attended parlor meetings, night after night open forums, returning home too tired to eat, too excited to sleep. Frequently at seven in the morning the telephone started ringing; somebody wanted to catch me before I left the house.

For the purpose of having a more solid and substantial basis on which to operate the _Review_, the New York Women’s Publishing Company was incorporated in May, 1918; shares were sold at ten dollars each. The women who gave both monetary and moral support were the wives of business men who advised them how to conduct this organization in the proper fashion. Each month Mary Knoblauch opened her charming apartment for the regular meetings any corporation was required to hold.

The movement can never be disassociated in my mind from Frances Ackermann, who, at the suggestion of Mabel Spinney of Greenwich House, came to us as Treasurer. She was exceptionally able and was soon one of our bulwarks, remaining with us eleven years. Her family was wrapped up in orthodoxy—church and Wall Street and the status quo in politics—but Frances’ interests were much broader, and she was not content to lead the usual type of life ordained by her social and financial standing.

Tall, very thin, wearing her clothes with an air, Frances was one of the finest persons I have ever known. To her, fair play amounted to a religion; she was so highly sensitive that she lay awake at night after merely reading of an injustice done to anybody. To hundreds of conscientious objectors who were incarcerated during the War because of pacifist or strike activities she sent cigarette money, magazines, stationery—always anonymously—assisting their families and suggesting plans for their own futures. Her death was not only a blow to us but a blow to any endeavor that was seeking understanding. Many lifers who depended on her for brightening luxuries must now wonder what has become of her.

In 1920 Anne Kennedy came to help boost the circulation of the _Review_ and gain further financial aid for it. She was a Californian with wide club experience, and had two children. Fair, in her thirties, cheerful, and a good mixer, she was most maternal-looking with her soft gray hair and sweet face; you felt you could lay your head on her bosom and tell her the story of your life.

The incorporation had heralded a new trend wherein we could have a recognized policy. When the _Review_ had first been started I had had to beg authors to write. Free speech was their favorite theme, and their pieces were inferior, but they were the only things I could fall back upon. I used to ask possible contributors, “Don’t you agree that these poor mothers should have no more babies?”

“Of course, but where’s there any article in that?”

Then I had to suggest ideas, show them how to link these up with larger sociological aspects, until they began to cast into the arena legal, medical, eugenic compositions. The material on free speech continued to come in, but we did not need to print it any longer.

Incidentally, we now secured second-class mailing privileges. Soon afterwards I happened to be talking to a cousin who worked in the Post Office, a very young boy in his early twenties, who kept assailing me with questions about the _Review_. I could not understand his unprecedented interest, and asked, “Why are you so curious?”

“Well, I’m the official reader. It’ll save my having to wade through every issue if you’ll tell me ahead of time just what your policy’s going to be.”

“Do you make the decisions?”

“That’s my job. If any seem objectionable I send them on to Washington.”

I was horrified to find this adolescent in a position which permitted him to pass judgment on such serious matters, but I was able to reassure him; the course we had adopted would in no way interfere with retaining our second-class mailing privileges.

Many of the buyers of the _Review_ had been disappointed because it contained no practical information. “I have your magazine. All in there is true but what I want to know is how not to have another baby next year.” Thousands of letters were sent out explaining that the _Review_ could not print birth control information. Nevertheless, some of the appeals, particularly from women who lived on lonely, remote farms, were so heart-rending that I simply had to furnish them copies of _Family Limitation_, though urging them to go to their physicians.

Every once in a while I had a telephone message to come down to the Post Office at an appointed hour. I did so, wondering and uncertain. Was the interview to be about the _Review_, _Family Limitation_, or what?

The official in the legal department whom I always saw, fatherly though not old, used to say, “Now, Mrs. Sanger, you’re still violating the law by sending your pamphlet through the mails. If you keep this up they’ll put you in jail again.”

I objected, “The Government and I had this out years ago. The Federal case was dismissed.”

“It never can be settled while we get these protests.”

To prove the Post Office was not having such an easy time of it, he pulled open a drawer and inside was a little pile of pamphlets and letters from religious fanatics, self-constituted moralists of one kind or another, women as well as men, who had received their copies and then complained. He showed me envelopes addressed to the Governor of New York, to the President of the United States. I studied the handwriting to see whether I could recognize it as identical with any that had come to me. Perhaps the postmark was Wichita, Kansas; there could not be many from a town of that size, and presently I remembered the request. It was a shattering thing to see that drawer. I had been earnestly trying to aid despairing mothers, and had been betrayed.

“Here’s this proof against you, Mrs. Sanger. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing. As long as these women ask me to help them, I’m going to do so.”

I intended to continue to the limit of my resources whether or not I had help from those whom I had originally counted upon. In order to make women’s clubs feel the need as I did I had often gone miles at my own expense to present a topic that had taken me years to prepare and then had had to express it to the accompaniment of the clatter of dishes or the stirring of spoons in after-dinner coffees. The members had seemed to have their minds on hot rolls or had been fidgeting to get on to the bridge tables. Sometimes a few, who had come to dabble in sentimentality, had experienced a pleasant emotional response, “Oh, the poor things,” but that had been as far as it had gone.

The continued apathy of such organizations disappointed me intensely; the desire to build up a structure appeared to dominate them all. I had lost faith in their sincerity, respect for their courage, and at this time had no reason to anticipate assistance from them. To upbraid, accuse, or censure them for not doing what I had hoped was useless, but I resolved that I was never again going to talk to them, and, when it seemed necessary that they be addressed, I sent others to do it.

My nervousness ahead of lectures continued to be akin to illness. All through the years it has been like a nightmare even to think of a pending speech. I promised enthusiastically to go here or there, and then tried to forget it. The morning it was to be delivered I awakened with a panicky feeling which grew into a sort of terror if I allowed myself to dwell on it. It was fatal to eat before a meeting.

Some people can keep an audience rocking with laughter and yet get over a message. But I cannot. Seldom do my hearers have anything merry from me. Advisers often say, “Lighten up your subject.” I have always resented this; I am the protagonist of women who have nothing to laugh at.

Heywood Broun once remarked that I had no sense of humor. I was surprised at him, but I could understand his statement in a way; he had been at only a few meetings as chairman and I had been serious to the point of deadliness, purposely bringing forth laborious facts and dramatic statistics. I was grasping at an opportunity to reach his audience because, whenever he was moved by anything deeply, he wrote a story in his column which by reason of its effective irony and smooth prose swayed others to the same extent.

I have had much fun, although it may have penetrated only to the intimate circle of friends. Once after giving what I thought was a very up-to-date, spirited talk at the Waldorf-Astoria, a dear old lady, at least in her middle eighties, tottered towards me with the aid of a cane and in trembling voice quavered, “I have traveled across the country to hear you speak, Miss Sangster. My mother used to read your poems to me when I was a little girl, and I feel this is a great day for me to be able to clasp your hand.” She had confused me with the poetess, Margaret E. Sangster, who in the mid-Nineteenth Century had been a regular contributor to religious magazines.

Inevitably I have been constantly torn between my compulsion to do this work and a haunting feeling that I was robbing my children of time to which they were entitled. Back in 1913 I had had some vague notion of being able to spend all my summers with them at Provincetown. That visionary hope had been immediately dissipated because too many painters began to discover it and the place became littered with easels and smocks. Gene O’Neill’s plays were being produced on the wharf opposite Mary Heaton Vorse’s house, and these brought many more people. I wanted to get away even further, and so did Jack Reed, who had also sought sanctuary there. A real estate agent took him to near-by Truro where the feet of New Yorkers had not yet trod, and I was invited to come along. We saw a little house on a little hill, one of the most ancient in the village. Below it the Pamet River wound like a silver ribbon to the ocean. An old sea captain had squared and smoothed and fitted the timbers, brought them up from the Carolinas in a sailing vessel, and fastened them tightly together with wooden pegs. The kitchen was bright and warm, and seemed as though many cookies and pies had been baked in it.

Jack bought the cottage, but he was never able to live there. As a staff correspondent of the _Metropolitan Magazine_ he was dashing from the Colorado Fuel and Iron strike to the European War and back again to New York. In 1917, knowing I, too, had looked at it with longing eyes, he asked whether I would like to buy it; he was starting for Russia the next day and had to have ready money. By a lucky chance I had just received a check for a thousand dollars in payment for some Chicago lectures. We exchanged check and deed. He left the next day for the land of promise whither Bill Haywood, his friend, had already gone and whence neither was to return.

Big Bill, who had steadily advocated resistance to conscription, had been arrested and freed on bail furnished by Jessie Ashley. She had forfeited it gladly to have him safely out of the country. I had had a long talk with him before he had made up his mind definitely to leave. The conversation brought back to me the picture of the times he and I had walked up and down the Cape Cod sands and he had given me such good counsel about not jeopardizing the happiness of the children.

Those who had opposed Bill for his “hands in the pocket” advice at the Paterson strike were the same who were opposing his jumping his bail. Since the day we had together visited the C.G.T. meetings in Paris, Bill had come to see the virtues of expediency; that, rather than languish in jail where he could accomplish no useful purpose, a revolutionary should, if he could, exile himself. “He who fights and runs away, will live to fight another day.” This, according to the American idea, was cowardice—you should stay and be a martyr. But to Bill it was now merely shortsighted. He had concluded that the average worker when he went in for rioting and hand-to-hand combat was beaten before he had begun. He realized the workers had been split by the War; they had not united and stood up against conscription with any backbone. They could not as yet be depended upon as a force, but some day he hoped to return and reorganize them.

Truro provided the children with three carefree months every summer in what still seems to me one of the most beautiful spots in the world. For several years I hung on to this dream of being with them constantly, but it was only a dream. I used to go down to open the house and perhaps snatch a week or so there before being obliged to hurry back, but father and my sister Nan were good foster-parents. This house was eventually to burn as had the one in Hastings; fate seemed to decree I should not be tempted to slip back into peaceful domesticity.